Somewhere online, I stumbled across a reference to a book published in Latin many centuries ago about the “ancient noble family of the Cottas.”  I began searching everywhere for a copy of this work, including the public library of the city of Eisenach, where the family publishing business had been founded.  

By a circuitous route, this resulted in an e-mail from someone who had found a reference to the Cotta family in a German encyclopedia published in the 1840s.  He attached some scanned images of the relevant pages, and asked if I wanted him to translate them for me.
 
I politely declined, because:

(a)    I hadn’t taken five years of German in junior and senior high school for nothing. 

(b)    His translation services seemed likely to be expensive.

(c)    I couldn’t wait a minute longer to find out if any of the fascinating Cottas I’d read about were related to the publisher who I knew I was related to—which would mean I was also related to them.

Since my German was rusty from many years of disuse, I rushed out to buy a German-to-English dictionary, then dove headfirst into translating the various Cotta entries in the encyclopedia.
 
A pleasantly-astonished grin spread across my face as I learned that I was related to all of them.